Developers have spent decades developing an abundance of desktop applications for execution on local machines of users. These applications include word processors, drawing applications, games and countless others. Since the development of many of these applications, however, users have begun to desire applications that are made available over a network (e.g., the Internet) rather than simply on a local machine of the user.
Because of this desire, developers have now begun the task of providing the functionality of previously-written desktop applications over the Web. Unfortunately, developers wrote many or all of these desktop applications in a type-unsafe language, such as C or C++. Based in large part on security concerns, the code of these applications typically cannot execute safely within a browser and, hence, has by and large not been made available for consumption over the Web. Instead, some developers have simply begun re-writing desktop applications (or applications similar to the previously-written desktop applications) in a type-safe language that a browser may utilize.
While re-writing applications for deployment over the Web may make sense in some circumstances, this strategy requires enormous monetary and time resources and fails to leverage the work that developers have already completed over the past several decades.